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Monday, April 30, 2012

The EPA Region 6 administrator who boasted of his “crucify them” philosophy of enforcement for oil and gas producers has resigned from his post at EPA. Al Armendariz announced Monday that he had submitted a letter of resignation Sunday.

In a letter to friends made public by The Dallas Morning News Monday, the EPA official — who came under fire following the release of video of a speech he made in 2010 — asserted that the decision to resign was his own and praised President Obama as the “most environmental president we have ever had.”

"Today I am resigning my position as regional administrator. This was not something that was asked of me by Administrator Jackson or the White House,” Armendariz wrote to friends. “It is a decision I made myself. I had become too much of a distraction, and no one person is more important than the incredible work being done by the rest of the team at EPA.”

His comments were featured in a floor speech delivered last week by Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe, who used them as proof that the EPA has an anti-oil and gas agenda.

The Armendariz speech compared the EPA to Roman conquerors. “I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement, and I think it was probably a little crude and maybe not appropriate for the meeting but I’ll go ahead and tell you what I said,” Armendariz said. “It was kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean.”

“They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them,” Armendariz continued. “And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years. And so you make examples out of people who are in this case not compliant with the law.” Shortly after his comments were made public Armendariz apologized for his words.

Prior to his resignation the EPA administrator had more than half of the representatives from the states contained within Region 6 calling for his ouster.

What happened to Chris Loesch (husband of our own Dana Loesch) last night is not a small deal. By manipulating Twitter's complaint process, Leftists were able to take down Chris's Twitter account on three different occasions and only a time-consuming Twitter storm was able to reinstate him (as of this writing he's back online). This is a big deal because the left is starting to figure out that Twitter will be a major player in this upcoming presidential election and the action they’re taking is already organized and extreme.

What troubles these Leftists is that they now know that through Twitter Americans are not only having a national conversation in an environment the left fears most -- without a mainstream media filter -- but we are also freely and without that filter exchanging ideas and information.

What truly terrifies the left, though, is that Twitter is now where media narratives are generated that the mainstream media can no longer ignore. As recently as last year, narratives inconvenient to the Left that began on Twitter (i.e., Obama wouldn't have found bin Laden without the water-boarding he opposed) and that would've surely been memory-holed otherwise, suddenly found their way into the MSM's news-cycle against the MSM's will.

Because the MSM can't ignore (and better yet, control or filter) these conversations taking place amongst millions, the media is now forced to either report on this topic or look completely out of touch with what activist America is most passionate about. Moreover, you now have thousands upon thousands of citizen journalists directly challenging the media on their biases.

Naturally, the loss of all this power greatly worries the Left, especially in an election year. And as they watched #ObamaAteDog and #FastAndFurious receive the kind of media coverage that never would've occurred without Twitter, the Left has now organized an outright cyber-vandalism campaign to silence their opposition. Moreover, now that the Left sees a vibrant and effective Twitter community pushing stories into the media, knocking dishonest ones down, and mocking every pathetic Obama 2012 hashtag gimmick, they are left with only one reply: Shut up!

We recently saw lots of sit-down strikes and demonstrations — the various efforts in Wisconsin, the Occupy movements, and student efforts to oppose tuition hikes. None of them mattered much or changed anything. There is a sit-down strike, however, that has paralyzed the country and has been largely ignored by the media.

Most economists since 2009 have been completely wrong in their forecasts, reminding us that their supposedly data-driven discipline is more an art than a science. After all, a great deal of money is invested and spent — or not — based largely on perceptions, hunches, and emotions rather than a 100 percent certainty of profit or loss. And the message Americans are getting is that the Obama administration is hostile to investment and business, and thus should be waited out.

Barack Obama’s original economic team — Austan Goolsbee, Christina Romer, Larry Summers, Peter Orszag — have long fled the administration, and have proved mostly wrong in all their therapies and prognostications of 2009. Despite the stimulus of borrowing over $5 trillion in less than four years, near-zero interest rates, and chronic deficits, the U.S. economy is in the weakest recovery since the Great Depression and mired in the longest streak of continuous unemployment of 8 percent or higher — 38 months — since the 1930s. The Mexican economy is growing more rapidly than is ours. Why did not massive annual $1 trillion–plus deficits spark a recovery, as government claimed an ever larger percentage of GDP, and new public-works projects were heralded by the administration?

Much of the answer is found in the collective psyche of those Americans who traditionally hire, purchase, or invest capital. An economy is simply the aggregate of millions of private agendas, of people sensing and reacting to a commonly perceived landscape. Yet since January 2009, that landscape has been bleak and foreboding.

Take the debt. The problem is not just that Obama has borrowed $5 trillion in less than four years, but also that he has offered few plans to reduce the ongoing borrowing and none at all to pay down the debt. Instead, he has demonized as heartless anyone who opposes his serial $1 trillion annual deficits. That demoralizes the public, who privately know that they cannot buy everything they might wish, and who expect that government will not, either. In the business community, there is the unspoken assumption that, at some point very soon, either taxes will have to rise, the currency will have to inflate radically, or debts will have to be renounced — all equally foreboding for those with capital. Some even believe that Obama is not a haphazardly profligate spender but a deliberate one who welcomes the radical measures on the horizon to stave off bankruptcy as laudable in themselves.

Take energy. We are reminded that the ANWR field in Alaska — and others far greater there — are still off limits. So too are over 25 million barrels off the California coast. Federal leases have been vastly curtailed in the Gulf of Mexico, off the Eastern Seaboard, and in the American West. The cancellation of the Keystone pipeline, which would have kept billions of U.S. petrodollars inside North America, coupled with Solyndra-like federally subsidized solar and wind boondoggles, sent the message that the government would oppose energy that was profitable and subsidize sources that were not.

Worse still, in less than four years, we have now an entire corpus of Obama-administration quotations blasting fossil-fuel energy. The president himself promised skyrocketed energy prices with his now-stalled cap-and-trade proposals. He mused that new regulations might bankrupt coal-burning companies. He ridiculed the idea of increasing oil and gas supplies by more drilling and instead pointed to the importance of proper tire pressure and regular tune-ups and spoke of tapping America’s vast algae resources. Secretary of Energy–designate Steven Chu mused that he wanted gas to reach European price levels, apparently in hopes of curbing fossil-fuel consumption while making alternative sources of energy more competitive. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who as a senator had claimed that even $10-a-gallon gas would not prompt him to open up federal lands for oil and gas leases, shrugged that there is no way of knowing whether $9-a-gallon gas is on the horizon. More recently, it was disclosed that an EPA regional administrator, Al Armendariz, had bragged of trying to “crucify” and “make examples” of gas and oil companies in the manner that the Romans did to conquered peoples.

The current renaissance in American oil and gas production is primarily a private effort to drill on private land, despite rather than because of the Obama administration. That the Obama administration takes credit for private companies’ finding new sources of low-priced oil and gas, despite government hopes that they would fail, only heightens the sense of private-sector cynicism and pessimism. The result is that “speculators” do not believe the oil companies will be given access to enormous energy reserves on public lands — and that, to the degree they drill new wells on private lands, a horde of apparatchiks from academia such as Mr. Armendariz will make life difficult for them.

The Mourdock campaign previously criticized Lugar for sending an absentee ballot application to likely Democratic Senate nominee Joe Donnelly and tens of thousands of other non-Republicans, as reported in the Indiana Legislative Insight on April 16, 2012.

“In yet another act of desperation to stem his precipitous drop in the polls, Lugar and his Washington establishment allies are now courting non-Republicans to vote in the GOP Primary on May 8th,” said Mourdock spokesman Chris Conner.

“With his votes in favor of earmarks and bailouts, Obama’s liberal Supreme Court picks and amnesty for illegal aliens, it’s no surprise that Dick Lugar has abandoned his hopes of being the choice for conservative Hoosiers.”

“All of this activity to convince non-Republicans to participate in the Republican primary begs a simple question for Senator Lugar: will he pledge to support the Republican nominee for Senate if it is not him?”

The American Spring begins tomorrow. We may be in serious trouble. - Reggie

Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, whose anti-greed message spread worldwide during an eight-week encampment in Lower Manhattan last year, plan marches across the globe tomorrow calling attention to what they say are abuses of power and wealth.

Organizers say they hope the coordinated events will mark a spring resurgence of the movement after a quiet winter. Calls for a general strike with no work, no school, no banking and no shopping have sprung up on websites in Toronto, Barcelona, London, Kuala Lumpur and Sydney, among hundreds of cities in North America, Europe and Asia.

In New York, Occupy Wall Street will join scores of labor organizations observing May 1, traditionally recognized as International Workers’ Day. They plan marches from Union Square to Lower Manhattan and a “pop-up occupation” of Bryant Park on Sixth Avenue, across the street from Bank of America’s Corp.’s 55-story tower.

“We call upon people to refrain from shopping, walk out of class, take the day off of work and other creative forms of resistance disrupting the status quo,” organizers said in an April 26 e-mail.

Occupy groups across the U.S. have protested economic disparity, decrying high foreclosure and unemployment rates that hurt average Americans while bankers and financial executives received bonuses and taxpayer-funded bailouts. In the past six months, similar groups, using social media and other tools, have sprung up in Europe, Asia and Latin America.

YouTube description: In this week's address, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan discusses the House Republican Budget, The Path to Prosperity. It is a responsible budget that tackles our fiscal crisis and protects future generations from a crushing burden of debt. This weekend (April 29) marks exactly 3 years since the Democrat-controlled Senate last passed a budget. That's inexcusable. We must stop Washington's reckless spending to save our country from fiscal collapse.

I bought Jonah Goldberg's book, Liberal Fascism, when it was first released several years ago. I read the first few chapters and due to busyness of life, I put it down and never picked it up again. Since that time, I have begun listening to audiobooks so a few days ago I downloaded Liberal Fascism and as I listened to the introduction I was absolutely stunned!

Goldberg's extensive research for that book exposes today's liberal/Progressive ideology to be the tyranny of 100 years ago. They are doing the exact same things they did before and most of the country is blind to their tactics and horrific, tyrannical beliefs. If you haven't read (or listened to) Liberal Fascism I can not recommend it highly enough.

No one who writes for a living wouldn't want to be the person behind Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism," which was not only a number-one New York Times'
bestseller, but also a seminal publication in the growing canon of
conservative-leaning books. What I would wish on no writer, however, is
having to face the challenge and pressure of writing a follow-up to such
a stunning debut. But with "The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat
in the War of Ideas" (out today),
not only has Goldberg (editor-at-large for National Review Online)
avoided the sophomore slump -- in many ways he has an even bigger
triumph on his hands.

Everything conservatives will be looking for is on every page of "Tyranny." Just as he did with "Liberal Fascism," Goldberg uses scholarly history, damning logic, pop culture, and laugh-out-loud humor to connect the dots that expose the Left as the vacuous, dishonest, State-addicted mercenaries they really are. But what sets "Tyranny" apart from its predecessor and, in my opinion, improves on it, is two things:

First, simply by its title alone, "Liberal Fascism" was red meat for the Right; a delicious, timely, page-turning balm in The Year Of Obama. As we were getting our electoral butts kicked in every corner of America -- as our worst political nightmares were impossibly coming true -- we could at least get under the covers and flick a flashlight onto Jonah's reassurance that we were right, dammit!

"Liberal Fascism" is ours and all ours, but to its credit, "Tyranny" is less so.

"Tyranny" isn't red meat as much as it's an argument. Yes, so was "Liberal Fascism," but that was a more pointed argument made from a somewhat belligerent posture (which I loved). "Tyranny," though, is something I would (and have) send to my Obama-loving, swing state-dwelling, left-wing mother. For years now, the two of us have fired books at one another in the hopes of persuading the other to see the light, and because Goldberg's theme is less about partisan politics than it is about intellectual honesty, I'm convinced it's going to be one of my more persuasive missives.

"Tyranny" isn't about ideology. Don't get me wrong, Goldberg still takes it to the Left, but liberalism (for very good reason) is merely the vehicle the author drives to explore the much bigger theme of how and why the left and their allies in media and academia have allowed political debate to devolve into cliché. The over-arching theme, however, is even bigger and speaks to conservative and liberal alike:

Think.

For.

Yourself.

Unfortunately for the Left, they're the ones most guilty of failing in that department (don't worry, Republicans take a few well-deserved licks), but I can't imagine any reasonable liberal, like my mother, reading Goldberg's words and not only rethinking how they themselves argue, but also feeling a little unsettled and bamboozled by some of the arguments they've bought into. Which brings me to my second point:

I haven't seen anything about this guy, Dan Savage, until today. Actually, I've never heard of him but Breitbart has several stories about him (linked below) and evidently there was a situation at a school where students walked out during his presentation. Fox and Friends interviewed a teacher from that school. - Reggie

Barack Obama has already held more re-election fundraising events than every elected president since
Richard Nixon combined, according to figures to be published in a new book.

Obama is also the only president in the past 35 years to visit every electoral battleground state in his first year of office.

The figures, contained a in a new book called The Rise of the President’s Permanent Campaign by Brendan J. Doherty, due to be published by University Press of Kansas in July, give statistical backing to the notion that Obama is more preoccupied with being re-elected than any other commander-in-chief of modern times.

Doherty, who has compiled statistics about presidential travel and fundraising going back to President Jimmy Carter in 1977, found that Obama had held 104 fundraisers by March 6th this year, compared to 94 held by Presidents Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Snr, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush combined.

Since then, Obama has held another 20 fundraisers, bringing his total to 124. Carter held four re-election fundraisers in the 1980 campaign, Reagan zero in 1984, Bush Snr 19 in 1992, Clinton 14 in 1996 and Bush Jnr 57 in 2004.

Doherty, a political science professor at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, has also analysed presidential travel to battleground or swing states, which change and fluctuate in number with each election cycle.

In their first years in office, Carter visited eight out of 18 battleground states and Reagan seven out of 17. Bush Snr, Clinton and Bush Jnr all visited around three-quarters of battleground states while Obama went to all 15 within his first 12 months.

Saturday, April 28, 2012

The concept of “Net Neutrality” lies at the heart of the Federal Communication Commission’s ongoing efforts to regulate Internet access. To its opponents, Net Neutrality is an Orwellian euphemism for
regulatory overreach, couched in appealing language about “the freedom of the Internet.”

At issue is the limited bandwidth available for accessing web sites. More bandwidth means faster access, but Internet speed is a commodity—there’s only so much of it available to go around. The amount of available bandwidth has increased exponentially over the past 20 years, to the point where today’s cell phones are loading Web pages faster than yesterday’s computers. But yesterday’s computers were mostly shuffling simple pages of text with a few small images, not gigabytes of online gaming, music and video. Demand kept pace with supply as the power of the Internet grew. Big Government is, once again, promising to overrule the laws of supply and demand.

Net Neutrality covers a range of regulatory proposals designed to force Internet service providers (ISPs) to treat all web traffic as equal, instead of selling precious bandwidth at varying price and performance levels. The key word is “force.” Massive new regulatory powers would be needed to impose Net Neutrality on companies that currently labor under the delusion that they own the infrastructure they have created, and can therefore rent it out as they see fit.

The Federal Communications Commission has spent the last several years looking for a blunt instrument it can use to enforce Net Neutrality. At one point, they were toying with the idea of classifying the entire Internet as a telephone monopoly, and activating 130-year-old rules to regulate it. A massive, bipartisan backlash in Congress scuttled that tactic.

Net Neutrality is a solution in search of a problem. The reader has probably not encountered much difficulty accessing even the smallest web sites. Big sites that deliver huge amounts of multimedia content with blistering speed pay extra for their performance, but this happily leaves ISPs with plenty of lower-cost extra bandwidth to sell. Net Neutrality would be movement, at gunpoint, away from efficient Internet capitalism, and into dreary online socialism. Imagine what would happen to Internet traffic if ISPs were required to treat obscure cat blogs the same way they handle Fox News, CNN and Netflix.

This is quite disturbing and only verifies the information in Rumors of War III. One more thing. Does anyone know the location of the last capital of the former Ottoman Empire? Istanbul, Turkey. - Reggie

On Friday Vice President Joe Biden offered Turkey’s Islamist government a leading role in the Middle East, despite its recent crackdown on dissidents, expansion of Islamic culture and education, and regional conflicts with Greece and Israel.

“We’re looking for Turkish leadership in the rest of that entire region,” Biden declared at a fundraiser attended by roughly 200 people from the Turkish and Azerbaijani communities, according to a White House pool report.

“It’s a model as to how you can have an Islamic population, an Islamic state and a democracy, something the rest of the region is groping to figure out how to do,” he told the audience, who paid up to $2,500 each to attend the fundraiser.

Since last June Turkey’s Islamist government, led by Recep Erdogan, “has restricted freedom of expression, association, and assembly with laws that allow authorities to jail its critics for many months or years while they stand trial for alleged terrorism offenses on the basis of flimsy evidence,” according to a January report by the left-wing group Human Rights Watch.

The Turkish government’s Islamist policies also clash with Biden’s progressive policies, and with American culture and laws in general.

For example, on April 18 Biden touted the Violence Against Women Act and slammed GOP proposals to upgrade the law.

However, in Turkey, “violence in the home is endemic, and police and courts regularly fail to protect women who have applied for protection orders under the Family Protection Law [and] reports of spouses and family members killing women rose in 2011,” Human Rights Watch reported.

Today, Time magazine got hold of a memo written by then-CIA head Leon Panetta after he received orders from Barack Obama’s team to greenlight the bin Laden mission. Here’s the text, which summarized the situation:

Received phone call from Tom Donilon who stated that the President made a decision with regard to AC1 [Abbottabad Compound 1]. The decision is to proceed with the assault.
The timing, operational decision making and control are in Admiral McRaven’s hands. The approval is provided on the risk profile presented to the President. Any additional risks are to be brought back to the President for his consideration. The direction is to go in and get bin Laden and if he is not there, to get out. Those instructions were conveyed to Admiral McRaven at approximately 10:45 am.

HANKS: Intelligence reports locating Osama Bin Laden were promising, but inconclusive, and there was internal debate as to what the President should do.

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: We sat down in the Situation Room, the entire national security apparatus was in that room, and the President turns to every principal in the room, every secretary, “What do you recommend I do?” And they say, “Well, forty-nine percent chance he’s there, fifty-one … it’s a close call, Mr. President.” As he walked out the room, it dawned on me, he’s all alone. This is his decision. If he was wrong, his Presidency was done. Over.

Only the memo doesn’t show a gutsy call. It doesn’t show a president willing to take the blame for a mission gone wrong. It shows a CYA maneuver by the White House.

One of the great differences between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives will freely admit that they have an ideology. We’re kind of dorks that way, squabbling over old texts like Dungeons and
Dragons geeks, wearing ties with pictures of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke on them.

But mainstream liberals from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama — and the intellectuals and journalists who love them — often assert that they are simply dispassionate slaves to the facts; they are realists, pragmatists, empiricists. Liberals insist that they live right downtown in the “reality-based community,” and if only their Republican opponents weren’t so blinded by ideology and stupidity, then they could work with them.

This has been a theme of Obama’s presidency from the start. A couple of days before his inauguration, Obama proclaimed: “What is required is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives — from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry” (an odd pronouncement, given that “bigoted” America had just elected its first black president).

In his inaugural address, he explained that “the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.”

Whether the president who had to learn, in his own words, that there’s “no such thing” as shovel-ready projects — after blowing billions of stimulus dollars on them — is truly focused on “what works” is a subject for another day. But the phrase is a perfect example of the way liberals speak in code when they want to make an ideological argument without conceding that that is what they are doing. They hide ideological claims in rhetorical Trojan horses, hoping to conquer terrain unearned by real debate.

Of course, Republicans are just as guilty as Democrats when it comes to reducing arguments to bumper stickers. (Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin has written that “the president’s economic experiment has failed. It is time to get back to what we know works.”) But the vast majority of Republicans, Ryan included, will at least acknowledge their ideological first principles — free markets, limited government, property rights. Liberals are terribly reluctant to do likewise. Instead, they often speak in seemingly harmless cliches that they hope will penetrate our mental defenses.

Here are some of the most egregious examples:

‘Diversity is strength’

Affirmative action used to be defended on the grounds that certain groups, particularly African Americans, are entitled to extra help because of the horrible legacy of slavery and institutionalized racism. Whatever objections opponents may raise to that claim, it’s a legitimate moral argument.

But that argument has been abandoned in recent years and replaced with a far less plausible and far more ideological claim: that enforced diversity is a permanent necessity. Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, famously declared: “Diversity is not merely a desirable addition to a well-run education. It is as essential as the study of the Middle Ages, of international politics and of Shakespeare.”

One of President Obama’s radical eco-bureaucrats has apologized for confirming an indelible truth: This White House treats politically incorrect private industries as public enemies who deserve regulatory death sentences.

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Al Armendariz, an avowed greenie on leave from Southern Methodist University, gave a little-noticed speech in 2010 outlining his sadistic philosophy. “I was in a meeting once, and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement, and I think it was probably a little crude and maybe not appropriate for the meeting, but I’ll go ahead and tell you what I said,” he began. In a video obtained and released by Sen. James Inhofe (R., Okla.), Armendariz then shared his bloody analogy:

It was kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years. . . . So, that’s our general philosophy.

Echoing President Obama’s “punch back twice as hard” treatment of his political enemies, Armendariz explained to his underlings: “You hit them as hard as you can, and you make examples out of them, and there is a deterrent effect there. And, companies that are smart see that, they don’t want to play that game, and they decide at that point that it’s time to clean up.”

In other words: Suck up, fly left, or face prosecution. The goal isn’t a cleaner environment. The goal is political incitement of fear.

Publicly humiliated by the video release of the persecution strategy session, Armendariz said this week he regretted his “poor choice of words.” “It was an offensive and inaccurate way to portray our efforts to address potential violations of our nation’s environmental laws. I am and have always been committed to fair and vigorous enforcement of those laws.”

Tyrannical actions, of course, speak louder than weasel words. And the record shows that Obama’s environmental overlords run amok.

A couple of days ago, Obama-campaign top dog David Axelrod threw in the towel on the dog war. “I thought it was a little absurd to talk about what the president had done as a ten-year-old boy,” he sniffed to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, which is as near as the suddenly sheepish attack dog will ever get to conceding that Barack Obama is the first dog-eating president in the history of the republic. For those coming late to the feud, the Democrats started it, assiduously promoting accounts of a 1983 Romney vacation to Canada in which the family pooch Seamus rode on the roof of the car. Axelrod and the boys thought they could have some sport with this, and their poodles in the media eagerly played along. The New York Times columnist Gail Collins alone has referred to it dozens of times.

And then Jim Treacher, the sharp-eyed wag of the Daily Caller, uncovered this passage from Chapter Two of Obama’s bestselling but apparently largely unread memoir Dreams from My Father, in which the author recalls childhood meals with his stepfather Lolo Soetoro:

I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.

There followed an Internet storm of “I Ate a Dog (and I Liked It)” gags. Axelrod, an early tweeter of Romney doggie digs, has now figured out that the subject is no longer profitable for his boss. The dogs he let slip aren’t quite that savvy. Jeremy Funk, communications director of “Americans United for Change,” is still bulk-e-mailing links to the dogsagainstromney.com video “Should We Have a President Who Isn’t Even Qualified to Adopt a Pet?” Confronted by the revelation that his preferred candidate only swings by the Humane Society for the all-you-can-eat buffet, he huffs that this is “false equivalence.” “A six-year-old with no choice in the matter” is not the same as a grown man choosing to place his dog on the roof of his vehicle. My Canadian compatriot Kate McMillan, a dog breeder, advised Mr. Funk to “try this experiment–sit a normal, American 6 year old down at a plate and tell him it’s dog meat. Watch what happens.”

For their next exploding cigar, the Democrats chose polygamy. Brian Schweitzer, the Democratic governor of Montana, remarked that Romney was unlikely to appeal to women because his father was “born on a polygamy commune.” Eighty-six percent of women, noted Governor Schweitzer with a keenly forensic demographic eye, are “not great fans of polygamy.” You can understand the 86 percent’s ickiness at the whole freaky-weirdy idea of a president descended from someone who had multiple wives. Eww.

Just for the record, Romney’s father was not a polygamist; Romney’s grandfather was not a polygamist; his great-grandfather was a polygamist. Miles Park Romney died in 1904, so one can see why this would weigh heavy on 86 percent of female voters 108 years later.

Meanwhile, back in the female-friendly party, Obama’s father was a polygamist; his grandfather was a polygamist; and his great-grandfather was a polygamist who had one more wife (five in total) than Romney’s great-grandfather. It seems President Obama is the first male in his line not to be a polygamist. So, given the “gender gap,” maybe those 86 percent of American women are way cooler with polygamy than Governor Schweitzer thinks. Maybe these liberal chicks really dig it.

During the Bush years, Bush was often compared to Hitler or Mussolini. The focus of the attacks had to do with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and angst over the supposed erosion of civil liberties due to warrantless wiretaps, among other things. There was a lot of hyperbole. Bush was a monkey, a Nazi, a Fascist, the devil’s spawn. The hyperbole became so hysterical some conservatives jokingly took to calling President Bush “Chimpy McBushHitler Halliburton.” Many on the right go too far in attacking the motives of President Obama in the same way the left attacked Bush. It is neither rational nor sane.

President Obama is, unlike President Bush, a progressive, but he is not a fascist.

One must be careful to say such things clearly these days lest the outrage pimps on the left try to drum up outrage on less than clear precision of word choice. President Obama does however, like President Woodrow Wilson, seek to harness the power of the state for the collective good of the American people, even at the expense of the individual. Many on the right view it as a European style socialist tendency because he does so in the name of fairness and believes the government should decide what each citizen’s fair share is. Consider President Obama’s recent speeches on the free market and individualism and compare them to Woodrow Wilson saying, “American is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise.”

“Reasonable” people do not often talk of fascism in the modern American state, but fascist tendencies from an earlier time in American history, properly understood, are rearing up among progressives again as President Obama amps up his heated rhetoric against free enterprise, conservatives, and the wealthy. While President Obama is not a part of what it happening, it is clear progressives, inspired by his agenda, have taken matters into their own hands to extremes we have not seen for a hundred years.

Fascism, properly understood, is not a right-wing ideology. While many characterize it as such, Wikipedia, of all places, has a pretty accurate rendering, explaining that

[f]ascists advocate a state-directed, regulated economy that is dedicated to the nation; the use and primacy of regulated private property and private enterprise contingent upon service to the nation, the use of state enterprise where private enterprise is failing or is inefficient, and autarky.

During the First World War, Woodrow Wilson and the progressive movement used war as a means to rally society to the collective good of the nation. George Perkins, a financier of progressive causes at the time, boasted that the First World War “is striking down individualism and building up collectivism.” Michael McGerr, in his book A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, cited one progressive who championed the war claiming, “Laissez-faire is dead. Long live social control.”

Jonah Goldberg, in his well regarded book Liberal Fascism, noted that “[m]ore dissidents were arrested or jailed in a few years under Wilson than under Mussolini during the entire 1920s.” Americans often ignore our history and often the media forgets history when it choses to report or not report something.

In May of 1918, several hundred publications were denied access to the postal service. As Goldberg documented in Liberal Fascism, “In Wisconsin a state official got two and a half years for criticizing a Red Cross fund-raising drive. A Hollywood producer received a ten-year stint in jail for making a film that depicted British troops committing atrocities during the American Revolution. One man was brought to trial for explaining in his own home why he didn’t want to buy Liberty Bonds.”

This was the state acting on its own. Consider though the American Protective League, officially approved by then Attorney General Thomas Gregory, and composed of private citizens acting as a “secret” organization. The organization harassed individuals and businesses, threatening and bullying any who stood in the way of the goals of the state. They spied on their neighbors, read their mail, and acted in ways similar to the variously colored shirted organizations in Europe and former European colonies. In fact, even Woodrow Wilson had misgivings about them writing Attorney General Gregory, “It would be dangerous to have such an organization operating in the United States, and I wonder if there is any way in which we could stop it?” Wilson did not stop it.

These were not right wingers. The APL and similar groups may have targeted unions, but did so on the belief that unions were disrupting activities of the progressive state, e.g. undermining Wilson’s war effort.

The re-emerged progressive movement, springing to action to “agitate” (their word choice) for President Obama’s agenda is troubling. There is a pattern of behavior within the modern progressive movement against dissent echoing the progressive movement during Woodrow Wilson’s tenure. Then, progressives engaged in fascist strategy and tactics to silence opposition to Wilson’s advance of the state over the individual. Many on the left then hailed Benito Mussolini as a hero and champion of progress in the way many on the modern left hail Hugo Chavez as the same. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, progressive activists are engaging in a similar pattern of intimidation and violence that they perversely think will help President Obama, even as he himself has voiced misgivings about their tactics and sought to distance himself from some of his most ardent supporters.

Friday, April 27, 2012

&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Your browser does not support iframes.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;

YouTube description: Today the House "ignored a veto threat" and passed a measure to stop new
student loan rates from doubling this summer. The bill pays for
extending current rates by cutting a slush fund the president himself
proposed cutting from ObamaCare -- a law that's making it harder for
small businesses to hire new workers, including recent college
graduates. Read more at The Speaker's Blog.

Partial YouTube description: Share this video and support Israel's right to defend and protect! NEVER AGAIN will Israel depend on the help of other countries for our survival. Israel must always protect the future of the Jewish People.

This questioning exposes the contempt of the Constitution shared by members of the Obama administration. It is quite obvious she did not consider or care about the Constitution's stance on religious liberty. All she cares about is getting her new rule implemented whether it is legal or not. Amazing! - Reggie

Try this thought experiment: You decide to donate money to Mitt Romney. You want change in the Oval Office, so you engage in your democratic right to send a check.

Several days later, President Barack Obama, the most powerful man on the planet, singles you out by name. His campaign brands you a Romney donor, shames you for "betting against America," and accuses you of having a "less-than-reputable" record. The message from the man who controls the Justice Department (which can indict you), the SEC (which can fine you), and the IRS (which can audit you), is clear: You made a mistake donating that money.

Are you worried?

Richard Nixon's "enemies list" appalled the country for the simple reason that presidents hold a unique trust. Unlike senators or congressmen, presidents alone represent all Americans. Their powers—to jail, to fine, to bankrupt—are also so vast as to require restraint. Any president who targets a private citizen for his politics is de facto engaged in government intimidation and threats. This is why presidents since Nixon have carefully avoided the practice.

Save Mr. Obama, who acknowledges no rules. This past week, one of his campaign websites posted an item entitled "Behind the curtain: A brief history of Romney's donors." In the post, the Obama campaign named and shamed eight private citizens who had donated to his opponent. Describing the givers as all having "less-than-reputable records," the post went on to make the extraordinary accusations that "quite a few" have also been "on the wrong side of the law" and profiting at "the expense of so many Americans."

These are people like Paul Schorr and Sam and Jeffrey Fox, investors who the site outed for the crime of having "outsourced" jobs. T. Martin Fiorentino is scored for his work for a firm that forecloses on homes. Louis Bacon (a hedge-fund manager), Kent Burton (a "lobbyist") and Thomas O'Malley (an energy CEO) stand accused of profiting from oil. Frank VanderSloot, the CEO of a home-products firm, is slimed as a "bitter foe of the gay rights movement."

These are wealthy individuals, to be sure, but private citizens nonetheless. Not one holds elected office. Not one is a criminal. Not one has the barest fraction of the position or the power of the U.S. leader who is publicly assaulting them.

Rep. Chaka Fattah’s assertion on Al Sharpton’s MSNBC show last night has received plenty of derision. Instapundit calls it “banking on the moocher vote,” and Twitter pundit Keder derisivelynotes,
“Democrats would rather give you freebie ‘benefits’ then do anything
useful that might actually help you find a job. I know this may be hard
for @TheDemocrats to understand, but the unemployed don’t want
‘benefits.’ They want jobs.” Unfortunately, that may all be true, but
that doesn’t make Fattah wrong, either:

husbands can have sex with DEAD wives up to six hours after their death

Egyptian husbands will soon be legally allowed to have sex with their dead wives for up to six hours after their death, local media is claiming.

The controversial new law is claimed to be part of a raft of measures being introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament.

It will also see the minimum age of marriage lowered to 14 and the ridding of women's rights of getting education and employment.

Egypt's National Council for Women is reportedly campaigning against the changes, saying that 'marginalising and undermining the status of women would negatively affect the country's human development'.

Dr Mervat al-Talawi, head of the NCW, wrote to the Egyptian People’s Assembly Speaker Dr Saad al-Katatni addressing her concerns.

Egyptian journalist Amro Abdul Samea reported in the al-Ahram newspaper that Talawi complained about the legislations which are being introduced under 'alleged religious interpretations.'

The subject of a husband having sex with his dead wife arose in May 2011 when Moroccan cleric Zamzami Abdul Bari said marriage remains valid even after death.

He also said that women have the right to have sex with her dead husband, alarabiya.net reported.

It seems the topic, which has sparked outrage, has now been picked up on by Egypt's politicians.

U.S. economic growth cooled in the first quarter as businesses cut back on investment and restocked shelves at a moderate pace, but stronger demand for automobiles softened the blow.

Gross domestic product expanded at a 2.2 percent annual rate, the Commerce Department said on Friday in its advance estimate, moderating from the fourth quarter's 3 percent rate.

While that was below economists' expectations for a 2.5 percent pace, a surge in consumer spending took some of the sting from the report. However, growth was still stronger than analysts' predictions early in the quarter for an expansion below 1.5 percent.

Although the details were mixed, the GDP report offered a somewhat better picture of growth compared with the fourth quarter, when inventory building accounted for nearly two thirds of the economy's growth. In the first quarter, demand from consumers took up the slack.

Consumer spending which accounts for about 70 percent of U.S. economic activity, increased at a 2.9 percent rate - the fastest pace since the fourth quarter of 2010. That compared to a 2.1 percent rise in the fourth quarter.

There were some signs of underlying strength, with even home construction rising at its fastest pace since the second quarter of 2010, thanks to the unusually warm winter.

But business spending fell for the first time since the fourth quarter of 2009, with investment in equipment and software rising at its slowest pace since the recession ended.

Business spending fell at a 2.1 percent pace after rising 5.2 percent in the fourth quarter.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Text from Glenn Beck site: Ted Nugent made headlines recently after something he said at the NRA conference landed him a date with the Secret Service. Tonight, Ted joined Glenn on GBTV to tell the full story on the out-of-control government overreach that almost resulted in a felony. You won’t believe the unbelievable regulations being forced on Ted and other Americans by this administration.

Glenn also spoke to Ted this morning on the radio show. Watch that interview here.

&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Your browser does not support iframes.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;

This is the latest Glenn Beck documentary and it is more disturbing than the ones he has released prior to this. This film makes the case that President Obama and his administration have welcomed the Muslim Brotherhood into the White House and placed it's members in high positions in our government. I know there is an election in November but I wonder if it will be too late for America. - Reggie

Sarah Palin was the first to recognize the problem: By participating in President Obama's signature education initiative, the Common Core Standards, Alaska would lose control over its own curriculum.

On May 31, 2009, then-Gov. Palin announced Alaska would adopt a "watch and wait" attitude:

"If this initiative produces useful results, Alaska will remain free to incorporate them," Gov. Palin said, adding that "high expectations are not always created by new, mandated federal standards written on paper. They are created in the home, the community and the classroom."

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, to his credit, was the next to recognize a federal boondoggle when he saw one: "I will not commit Texas taxpayers to unfunded federal obligations or to the adoption of unproven, cost-prohibitive national standards and tests," Gov. Perry wrote in a Jan. 13, 2010, letter to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

In the ensuing two years, it's become clear that Perry and Palin -- two core conservative figures whose intelligence is routinely mocked by liberal "sophisticates" -- were brilliantly prescient, indeed prophetic.

Common Core Standards turn out to be like Obamacare -- you don't really know what's in it until after you pass it and are mired in its tentacles.

George Soros, Georgetown University professors, and self-described ‘Catholic’ group join forces to burn Paul Ryan at the stake

The self-described “Catholic” group protesting Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R., Wis.) speech at Georgetown University Thursday has ties to the Obama administration and left-wing advocacy groups funded by liberal billionaire George Soros.

The protest, which aims to critique Ryan’s “attacks on the poor” and will feature a 50-foot banner reading “Were You There When They Crucified The Poor?” is part of a broader effort to portray the Republican budget as a fundamentally anti-Catholic document heading into the 2012 election season.

Catholics United, the group leading the protest, describes itself as a “nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to promoting the message of justice and the common good found at the heart of the Catholic Social Tradition.”

Judging from the organization funding Catholics United, however, the group’s partisan leanings are clear.

The Soros-funded Tides Foundation has given $65,000 to the organization since 2007, and has given nearly $200,000 to the affiliated group Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.

Another Soros-funded group, the Open Society Institute, has given $450,000 to Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good since 2005.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue dismissed Catholics United as a “Soros-funded front group” created for the sole purpose of promoting liberal policies that is completely out-of-touch with the teachings of the Catholic Church.

“They don’t have legitimate membership,” he told the Washington Free Beacon. “But every election year they get resurrected.”